The famous gardens, on which the gay and extravagant Lady Walpole spent her time and money, have been built over by the successive additions to the Infirmary; and we no longer can see the conservatory and grotto, without which in those days no garden was considered complete. The bit of ground left serves now for the convalescent soldiers, and the graceful tree in the centre, its branches growing horizontally out from the top of the trunk, forms a natural arbour, which they mightily enjoy upon a sunny afternoon. Down at the lower end of the garden, a bit of rotting wooden fence set above a sunken wall marks the line of the river-bank as it ran before the building of the embankment. Just here, on a pleasant terrace and in its summer-house, that royal scamp, George IV., was fond of philandering with his fair friends; this scene suggesting a curious contrast with the group once surely sitting or strolling here—a group made up of no less august personages than Charles II. and the Earl of Sandwich with the Duchess of Mazarin, followed by “her adoring old friend” St. Evremond. For that lovely and luckless lady lived just across the road, outside these grounds; and to her house in Paradise Row I wish now to take you. * * * * * All that is now left of old Paradise Row is half a dozen small brick cottages, with tiny gardens in front, and vines climbing above. Once, when all about here was country, these dwellings must have been really delightful, and have justified the suggestion of their name, looking out as they did on pleasant parterres, terraced to the river. Unpretending as they are, they have harboured many historic personages. In Paradise Row—it is now partly Queen’s Road West—lived the first Duke of St. Albans, Nell Gwynne’s son, not far from the more modest mansion of his venerated grandmother, among the “neat-houses” at Millbank. Her garden sloped down to the river, and therein she fell one day, and was drowned; and they wrote a most woeful ballad “Upon that never-to-be-forgotten matron, old Madame Gwynn, who died in her own fish-pond;” and it would seem from these ribald rhymes that the lamented lady was fat and fond of brandy! This latter weakness is also the theme of Rochester’s muse, in his “Panegyric upon Nelly,” when he commends her scorn of cost in the funeral rites— “To celebrate this martyr of the ditch. Burnt Brandy did in flaming Brimmers flow, Drunk at her Fun’ral: while her well-pleased Shade Rejoic’d, e’en in the sober Fields below, At all the Drunkenness her Death had made!”